


Wine-Dark Sea

by sister_coyote



Series: Sea and Space [1]
Category: Wine-Dark Sea
Genre: Action/Adventure, M/M, Missionfic, Mythology - Freeform, OrgXIII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-10
Updated: 2006-12-10
Packaged: 2017-10-04 14:15:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sister_coyote/pseuds/sister_coyote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They keep trying because there's nothing else to do. A mission to the lands of Olympus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wine-Dark Sea

**Author's Note:**

> Mild spoilers for the game.

Demyx knew that sailing the gray sea beyond the Coliseum was not a pleasure for Xigbar, who spent the entire time looking damp and uncomfortable. Xigbar liked movement in straight lines, and being dry, and swift travel. Demyx couldn't _blame_ him, but it was hard to understand that when the salt-sea air and the blowing spray sang through his veins.

The gods and demigods of the Olympian lands had powers which the Organization could hardly put names to, let along understand—and one of those powers was the ability to block the formation of portal to darkness. So there was no other way to travel to the Island of Amalthea except over the sea. Which was fine by Demyx; when he closed his eyes, he could _feel_ the water beneath him, going down and down, alive with currents and wellsprings.

"It's fucking freezing," Xigbar said.

"Mmmn," Demyx said, eyes still closed, smiling: "I remember _exactly_ how sympathetic you were that time in Agrabah. What was it you said to me?"

Xigbar snorted. "'You'll live,' I think," he said. "Hell. How come you remember things only when it's inconvenient?"

Demyx turned around and opened his eyes in time to see Xigbar furiously pushing damp strands of hair back where the spray had stuck them to his face. He took pity and held up his hand. "Water, to me," he said, and the moisture which hung in Xigbar's robes and glistened in his hair rose off him in a mist and whirled itself into a glistening marble of water in the palm of his hand. He threw it back and forth from one hand to the other. "Better?"

"For now."

Demyx turned back to the bow of the ship. "See. This is why you should be nice to me."

He could hear the leer in Xigbar's voice. "I _am_ nice to you, kid."

He couldn't help grinning. "Okay, yeah. Sometimes you are."

The trireme itself required little attention from either of them—Demyx's powers kept it stable and moving in the right direction. When night fell, they huddled around a brazier. Xigbar attempted to roast fish on the grate at the top of the brazier, while Demyx stuck chunks of hard cheese on skewers and toasted them in the heat. Half the time, the cheese melted and dripped off before he could catch it, but he felt so good from the presences of all the water beneath and around them that he couldn't bring himself to care. And this world, with its many islands and wide seas, reminded him of Emyd's home, and though that made him a little sad, the familiarity was nonetheless pleasing.

"So this _rhyton_ thing," he said, "what do we need it for?"

"Y'weren't paying attention?" Xigbar asked, picking a piece off fish off the grate with his bare fingers and tossing it from hand to hand until it cooled. Demyx darted out a hand to break off a piece of fish before he could eat it, earning himself a baleful look from Xigbar's good eye.

"Course I was," he said, sounding mildly wounded—but really, he suspected Xigbar asked more out of habit than anything else. "I was paying attention to the bits where he was describing the _monsters_."

"Well." Xigbar retaliated for Demyx's theft by snaring a perfectly-toasted lump of cheese right before it fell in the fire. "Can't fault your priorities. The rhyton is a horn . . . thing . . . that can grant you whatever you might desire, according to Xemnas. You can see why that'd be useful."

"Hearts," Demyx said. "It could give us back—"

"Maybe," Xigbar said, cutting him off sharp. "Xemnas isn't sure. But it's worth a try." He held his long hands in front of the blazing fire. Demyx repressed the urge to reach out and take them, warm them between his hands, maybe find some other way to warm him up. But Xigbar was funny about messing around when on a mission.

Demyx dreamed of the press of deep water, and the color of sunlight viewed from beneath the waves.

***

It was no surprise, when they met the monsters—they could be seen from miles away. Or Scylla could. Demyx felt Charybdis from even farther away, by the way her maw distorted the currents of water into a black sucking whirlpool.

"Ready, kid?" Xigbar asked. He was still soaked, still unsteady on his feet, but the prospect of combat made his eye glitter like pyrite with anticipation, and his crooked scar-pulling grin appeared for the first time since they'd set foot on the ship.

"Ready," he said.

They'd settled on the division of labor from the beginning. Scylla, with her six snarling heads, was Xigbar's to deal with. Demyx would handle Charybdis.

Xigbar snapped out of sight and re-appeared twenty feet in the air, guns drawn and spitting arrows. His hair whipped around his face. Even for Demyx, who was of all the Organization perhaps the one least comfortable with overt violence, watching Xigbar fight was a pleasure. He handled his approach to Scylla with mathematical precision: porting to one place and snapping off a volley of arrows, inverting to repeat with another volley of arrows, these aimed at the long necks below the fanged heads, then popping to another location just as one of the heads snapped where he had been.

But he couldn't admire for long, because Charybdis' hungry jaws dragged at the seawater and tried to tear control of the boat out of his hands.

The sitar solidified in his grip almost without thought. He played a series of notes, layering the melody over his will to reinforce his command of the water, tugging the currents back to his bidding. For a moment it seemed to be working, and the trireme shuddered back onto its course. Then the Charybdis roared and _swallowed_, and drew strong as a tide against the water. He played another long riff of notes, humming a counter-melody, this time not pulling back from Charybdis but pushing hard in an attempt to seal her jaws shut.

The trireme jerked under his feet, so hard he lost his balance and sat hard on the deck. Charybdis swallowed and swallowed, apparently without satiation; no matter how much water he pushed at her, she simply consumed it. He struck a discordant chord, shoving the trireme a little bit back onto course, but not enough—

_Not working,_ he thought desperately, _not working, not working . . . ._

A wave crashed up over the deck and soaked him, which was a good thing, because the water crackled through him like fresh energy and gave him an idea. _Worth a try. What is there to lose?_ He stilled his hands on the sitar strings, and began to play again, but this time not in a deliberate attempt to control the water. The song that spun from the sitar's strings was a slow, melancholy song; it had no effect on the water whatever. The trireme slipped from his control and pitched wildly toward the whirlpool.

He heard Xigbar's boots hit the deck next to him, and Xigbar's voice, strained and breathless, demand, "What the hell are you doing?"

He didn't have the attention to spare to respond to him. He put everything into the song, moving his pick over the strings. He wasn't really even aware of when he'd begun to sing, only that he was singing, his voice weaving between the steady hum of the resonators and the melody of the strings.

The Charybdis' whirlpool lessened a little, and then a little more, and then her great jaws eased shut, and the sea smoothed out. Demyx played a few more bars, and then let the sitar dissolve and collapsed with his back against the wet boards of the deck.

"What was that?" Xigbar asked, dropping to sit heavily beside him.

"Music," Demyx said. "Soothes the savage beast, you know."

***

The island of Amalthea was green and mild, and it was easy to guide the trireme close to the pebbled beach and instruct the waves not to let it drift too far away. The woman—inhumanly lovely, milky of skin and dark of hair with a goat's golden eyes and square pupils—sat beneath an apple tree with an oversized goat's horn in her lap.

Xigbar walked straight up to her. She looked up at him with no fear. He said, "We're here for—"

"Take it," she said in a voice like honey, and held it out to him. In her hands, it was full of fruit and flowers, but as soon as Xigbar's hands touched it, it emptied. He stared at it, then handed it mutely to Demyx. Demyx took it, and tried to think of what he wanted—what he needed—a warmth and a presence in the part of him that was hollow and empty. But nothing happened.

"There is one thing the Horn cannot give you," said Amalthea, and she said it sadly, as though she were truly grieved.

"What?" Demyx asked.

"It can give you your heart's desire," she said. "But it cannot give you your heart."

Demyx ached savagely in the empty place where his heart should have been. He knelt, quietly, and put the horn back in her hands, where it burst back to vibrant life.

***

"So it was for nothing," Demyx said, standing on the edge of the island. The smell of salt and the damp of sea-spray soothed him.

Xigbar shrugged, but didn't say anything. He didn't lie, not even to be comforting. Demyx was the only one who had clung to _that_ particular artifact of his humanity.

"It's depressing," Demyx added. "What do we do now?"

Xigbar didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, "We just keep going. That's all there is _to_ do, kid."

"Mm," he said. Then: "Do we need to leave right away?"

"I don't think so."

They ate apples from Amalthea's tree, and dried off in the sunlight and warm wind. Then, without preamble, Demyx pulled Xigbar down under the tree. "_Now_?" Xigbar asked, surprised and amused.

"I'm keeping going," Demyx said. Xigbar's mouth twisted up at one corner, and after a moment he nodded once, sharp.

Xigbar's mouth and skin were hot, as always, and maybe that was why he disliked the ocean-cool so much; he was pure _energy_, bound in skin. Out of his robes, he looked almost at home: he had the deep olive skin and black hair that Demyx had often seen among villages on the islands they sailed past. That was one way in which this place differed from Emyd's home, where the natives were dark of skin but fair of hair; his Other had had darker skin, in fact.

Demyx kissed Xigbar until the rush of blood drowned out his thoughts, until Xigbar warmed to it and kissed him back, nipping his lower lip. Demyx leaned over him, one knee on the warm grass and the other thigh pressed against Xigbar's cock. Xigbar said, "_Fuck_," and laughed. And the ocean was near and that made everything a little better, just a little better, just a little.

Xigbar's hand trailed down his chest and closed around him, and he exhaled on a moan, listening to the crash and roar of his blood and the ragged pace of Xigbar's breathing. But the angle was not quite . . . not quite what he needed, and he shifted his weight until he straddled Xigbar's hips and could press their cocks together. Xigbar shifted his grip a little and oh and his hand was big enough to get around both of them, oh, _oh_ . . . . So Demyx could brace his hands on the grass on either side of Xigbar's head and let his weight do the work for him, easy as anything, rocking a little like the lapping of waves, and breathing the sea air.

And it was good and then it was _better,_ steady movement, pleasure building just as steady. Shortly after that Xigbar moaned rough and Demyx felt his cock slide slick against Xigbar's come, and he couldn't hold back a breathy noise of his own, his eyes shut and then open, so he could see the intensity of Xigbar's gaze, sharp and narrow as a hawk, and the silver-on-black-on-green of Xigbar's hair against the grass. His orgasm caught him like a current, and he shuddered and settled against Xigbar for a moment, until their breathing quieted.

They washed in the ocean, which was unnaturally warm here, at the edge of Amalthea's isle. Demyx stood longer in the water than he meant to, feeling the long fingers of the current.

"Ready to go?" Xigbar asked, and Demyx sensed the edges of the question-within-the-question.

"I think so," he replied. "Yes."


End file.
